For some time, contemporary medicine has been struggling to make sense of itself. Embroiled in this miasma of confusion, I have found this to be rather disconcerting. I am told to focus on the needs of patients over my own. And yet I am told that people are no more than chemical accidents in a long chain of reactions without inherent worth. I am told to be compassionate and caring but to avoid some patients that are just dealing with those pathological things we have labelled grief and anxiety. I am told to stand for equality and justice, but I also must define my own truth and meaning in life. Dogmas are present in abundance, yet they are no guide to lucid thinking. Modern medicine is in ideological shambles and without direction. Despite the weightiness of daily encounters of illness and death, we fail to ask the fundamental question: What is the point of it all?

While trained as a physician, my background is in theology. When I recently spoke at a local palliative care conference, I asked the medical students in the audience how many had studied disciplines outside the biological sciences in their undergraduate education. None raised their hands. As we increasingly specialize, we lose a sense of the wider universe. Medicine becomes the world and all therein. We have become blinded in our little corner of the world, and with no input from without we continue to trudge along our path riddled with errors and no correction.

Medicine MisdirectedWe can have no direction without a robust understanding of people and our world. This is where our ignorance is most profound. The reductionistic model of humanity largely adopted by the medical establishment is incomplete. People are understood in purely naturalistic terms, which means humans and their deepest loves and aspirations can be understood, as Bertrand Russell said, solely as “the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms.”(1) In this vein of thought, there is no meaning, no purpose, and nothing greater than the chemical reactions both in and outside our heads called “life.” The reason this model is dissatisfying is twofold: it goes against what we know better both rationally and experientially.

While historically a strictly naturalistic view of the world has correlated with a heavy emphasis on reason, naturalism is rationally unstable. If people are but matter and motion in an unguided, chaotic world, our very thoughts must likewise be accidental. It is quite an intellectual leap to deduce knowledge and thought from electrical impulses. Further acrobatics are required to assume such ideas can describe phenomena in a way that is true or untrue, right or wrong. There is no reason to believe one fortuitous arrangement of brain chemistry is necessarily more “true” than that of another configuration. They simply exist. A materialistic framework further has no place for the logic on which rationalism is built, which too must be a material entity and therefore not rationally binding upon all persons. This dominant medical worldview is simply not intellectually viable.

On the other hand, man as matter and motion is experientially counterintuitive. When we speak of love, the idea that it is reducible to chemical interactions is both sterile and repugnant. When we hear a masterpiece such as Bach’s Air on the G string, we know we have encountered something both ineffable and heavenly. When we stand before the tranquil surface of Lake Louise and the still giants of the Rockies sprinkled with morning sunbeams newly freed from their billowy slumber, we know beauty is more than electrochemistry. And in suffering and in grief, the spectres of chance and indifference provide no solace for our weary hearts. No, we must be more than accidental machines.

Medicine and the Human PersonIt is no surprise, then, to see that a number of dissenting movements have developed out of medicine itself. There is a new emphasis on the biopsychosocial model of health, which aspires to be a holistic approach to the human person, including at times spiritual dimensions. Narrative medicine has tried to understand people in the context of life stories. There has been a concurrent revival in the medical humanities as a means to foster more humanistic qualities in both learners and physicians, whether through engaging literature, the visual arts, or other modalities. Palliative medicine has likewise seen a rise, as the end of life tends to elicit questions that challenge our notions of life as atomic accidents. Finally, the intersection between medicine and religion has blossomed, and it is in this interdisciplinary forum that the deep questions of what it means to be human and healthy flourish.

Religion is the manifestation of weighty and profound questions of the human heart. In religion we see beyond medicine’s blinders. And in medicine we face the realities of the evils of sickness and decay. Two disciplines can hardly be more aptly wed. What does it mean for us to know God when the world around us crumbles? What is health and a meaningful life in a world that thrives on the transience of the newest phone and 140 character life snippets? How do we practice medicine in a world that denigrates human worth and disregards the nature of the cosmos? These are all questions that we ask at the intersection of medicine and religion.

The Conference on Medicine and Religion has proven to be an enriching venue to seek these answers collectively. This community of scholars and clinicians is concerned with making sense of medicine and its purposes. Religion inevitably provides guidance in this pursuit. And in the midst of this work, I have had the added pleasure of those encounters that begin with, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one,” those moments that C. S. Lewis identified as the beginning of a new friendship.(2) We find that there are others who are concerned with medicine’s muddled thoughts and aimless course. We are not solely engaged in high-brow intellectual calisthenics but instead on a quest to understand the human predicament and how we might work for human flourishing. This interdisciplinary forum has taken major steps in enabling sorely needed correctives to our current trajectory. Let us hope this work and its influence continues to grow as a positive force in the world of modern medicine.​References1. Russell B. The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Volume 12: Contemplation and Action 1902-14. Rempel RA, Brink A, Moran M, editors. London: Routledge; 1993, 67.2. Lewis CS. The Four Loves. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Janovich; 1960, 65.